This article explores the issue of self-effacement in adolescence and what it means for the process of subjective appropriation, using an original treatment framework centered on the “drawn narrative”. Clinical work undertaken with a young adolescent girl suffering from narcissistic and identity problems helps us to see how self-effacement contributes to the reorganization of reflective capacities and to re-establishment of the preconditions for subjectivation, supported by the mirror function of the medium and of the therapist.
The dynamics of the subjective appropriation of the changing body and the narcissicistic-identity reconfigurations at work in a suicidal adolescent girl actualize the vicissitudes of primary object relations on the scene of the individual somatic body as well as on that of the group body. On these scenes of the body, one can discern an attempt to reconstitute the equipment of power weakened by the profound transformations of puberty. But also, the search for a unifying double can be brought to light. The identification process is characterized here by the disjunction of imitation and introjection.
Beginning from an unusual clinical experience composed of fragments of improbable encounters with an adolescent going through a period marked by high-risk behaviour in a violent context before becoming an « extreme ski » professional ; I propose to study the question of death at adolescence… not as a reflection on loss and grievance, but as an essential figure of the unrepresentable which organizes high-risk behaviour during adolescence. With this approach, death reunites inevitable and random figures while confronting what is unrepresentable of one’s own death. Thus, we have a different reading of the classical approach to risk-taking, which commonly refers to the idea of ordealistic, high-risk behaviour as a narcissistic trial. Another approach considers risk-taking as an attempt to represent an intimate relationship with death and what is unrepresentable of one’s own death. This dynamic takes form in what may be called an instantaneous clinical moment, where what is experienced during the act cannot be resolved through the realization of the act itself. It is in fact the question of a chaotic attempt to express, by feeling, an experience which remains errant.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7